Requiem for a Wren (23 page)
and shot straight upwards for the clouds, and by the mercy of God at that moment there was nobody upon my tail. I jettisoned the hood as I went up and wrenched away the oxygen and radio, and with each hand in turn I managed to draw my damaged legs close up to me in spite of the pain. Then I pulled the stick back and turned her over, waited an instant and pushed it forwards and got thrown out cleanly, probably at about two thousand feet. I had enough sense left to pull my parachute and then I think I may have passed out, because I can't remember anything about the descent or landing. The next thing I remember is sitting on the snow with some chaps of the RAF Regiment about me putting tourniquets upon my legs; one of my feet wasn't there at all, and the other was a mess. There was a Bofors gun nearby; I was very lucky to have got down so near help for I was bleeding like a pig. Then a doctor came and gave me a shot in the arm and I passed out again.
That is how my service in the RAF came to an end.
A couple of days later I was flown in a Dakota direct from Evere to an aerodrome near Shrewsbury in the west of England, and I spent the next four months in the RAF hospital there. They operated three times because they tried to save the left foot but weren't able to. I was very depressed in those months, because it's not funny to lose both your feet when you're thirty years old. You don't realise that in time you'll get accustomed to the disability, that in years to come you may have just as much enjoyment out of life as you had before, though in a different way. I was passionately fond of winter sports and ski-ing as a young man and all that was over for me now, and swimming also, and long walks over the hills. I had black moods when I was in the hospital that lasted for days on end, cursing myself for an idiot that I had ever baled out. I should have had the guts to take it.
Outside the RAF I had few friends in England, and as the months went on my Service friends were all dispersed. I didn't want to see anybody, anyway. I am ashamed to say that in those months I thought little about Janet Prentice; when I did so it was in cynical reflection that she had not bothered to answer the letter I had written to her. I'm not
very proud of those months of self-pity, but that's what happened.
Presently I was moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital at Clifton just outside Bristol, and I was there till November 1945. We had considerable freedom as patients in that place while we were being fitted with artificial feet and learning to walk on them, for part of the treatment was that we should get used to taking part in normal life. I had of course, as much money as I liked to ask my father for, for wool was already high and Coombargana was doing well in spite of the rabbits; I was far better off than most of the other chaps. The obvious thing for me to do was to buy a car to get around in, but there were difficulties and frustrations all around that one. No new cars were available and the six-year-old one that I bought gave constant trouble which I wasn't really fit to cope with, for I couldn't stand at first on my new feet for more than a few minutes at a time. The petrol allowance I could get, though generous by British standards in those days, was far too small to let me range widely over England, and I was allowed no new tyres at all. There was little that was healthy, therefore, for me to spend my money on and it mostly went on drink and rather dreary parties with the nurses; I suppose I was already too old to take much pleasure in a wild time with the girls.
By the time I left the Orthopaedic Hospital tottering on my new feet I was disenchanted with England, and only anxious to get back to Coombargana, my own place, where anyway the sun would be shining and petrol and new tyres would be available for me to travel on, whatever the regulations might say; I knew that much about my countrymen. I booked a passage home by sea for February, not caring to fly, and got enough black-market petrol to drive my car to Newhaven. In France there was unlimited petrol for anyone who had the money to pay for it and freedom of movement was restored to me, and by the time that I got south of Lyons the sun was shining. I spent a pleasant couple of months exploring the South of France and Italy as far as Rome, and in those months I got back some of my mental poise again.
The ship did a good bit to dispel it. I returned to London a
few days before sailing for Australia and sold my car, but I was hamstrung without it. While I had the car I was a free man, able to travel and enjoy life like other people, but without it on the ship I was a pitiful cripple. I had a couple of falls in the rough weather of the Bay, one in the dining-room in front of everybody, and everyone was very sorry for me, which made me furious. I spent most of the rest of the voyage in my cabin, having my meals there, wondering if I was a fool to go back home to Coombargana if I could never ride a horse again. Up till the time I had left home, of course, the whole of the work about the property was done on horses.
There was a Queenslander from Rockhampton on board, a chap called Petersen who had lost a leg at Arnhem; he had been a paratrooper and had spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. He was in much the same state physically and mentally as I was, and we used to drink and talk about the war each night in my cabin or his, and sometimes we would get a crowd together for a poker game, playing pretty high. I don't think I went to bed entirely sober any night of the voyage or before two in the morning; I used to lie in bed till about noon and then get up and sit around in the cabin trying to read and drinking a good bit, till evening came and all the women out on deck went in because it was getting cold, and I could go out for a breather without people staring at me or being sympathetic. Then would come dinner in the cabin and the serious business of the day, which was talking about the war and drinking.
We got to Fremantle at last and there my father met me. He had booked seats for us on the airline to Adelaide but I didn't want to fly; I had a scunner against flying at that time which took about two years to fade. So Dad came round to Adelaide with me in the liner, and I must say he was good. He saw that I was drinking pretty hard and set himself to drink with me, matching scotch with scotch; when I talked about my war he'd start talking about his. We both got shot together each night on the way round from Adelaide and he won a lot of his own money off me at poker. He made my homecoming far easier than I had thought it would be, because when we got back to Coombargana and he laid off the
grog because of Mother it was easy for me to play along with him and go slow on it too.
Dad had met Harry Drew during the war and had brought him to Coombargana when they got demobilised and made him foreman; Dad was always a good picker of men. Mother was already getting disinclined to travel on her own, so Harry brought the old Bentley they had bought before the war to Adelaide to meet us at the ship, and we drove home in that. I drove it most of the way and it was a delight to be at the wheel of a decent car. In a car I could regain my freedom of movement and be equal to anybody once again.
At Coombargana I found that Dad had come back from the war with some pretty advanced ideas about the mechanization of the property. Before the war Coombargana ran almost entirely upon horses in the traditional style. I don't think we had more than one truck on the station; we had an old kerosene tractor but I don't remember that it was used much, and we conserved little fodder. I remember that we used the tractor for ploughing firebreaks before the war but I don't think we ever ploughed up a paddock; we grazed entirely on the natural grasses of the district. All the real work of the property was done with riding and draught horses; all told we had about eighty horses on the place, to the ten or eleven we keep now.
Dad, however, had spent much of the war in the Northern Territory in close contact with the highly mechanised American Army; he had seen a thousand miles of first-class bitumen road made at an incredible speed between Alice Springs and Darwin; he had seen vegetable farms to feed the Army created from the bush by modern agricultural machines, producing the vegetables in a matter of months. He had watched all this carefully with his mind on Coombargana, sifting out what was likely to be useful to us from what was not. When I got home in the Australian autumn of 1946 I found that he had brought a number of disposal vehicles on to the station, most of which proved useless to us in the end because they had been designed for other service but which gave us valuable experience. The Bren carrier lies rotting in a brier thicket now because re didn't really do anything we
wanted and we couldn't get spares for it, but we learned from it that a tracked vehicle was necessary to us in the winter and our big diesel crawler is the outcome of that knowledge. We still use a couple of the four-wheel-drive Chevrolet trucks he bought, but the disposal jeeps have long since given place to Land Rovers.
I found that Dad was still using his horse to get about the property, though he had a sneaking affection for a jeep and was starting to drive where he had ridden formerly. When I got home I made a conscious effort to take an interest in the station though it all seemed terribly small and insignificant after the business I had been engaged in for the last six years. A horse was impossible for me, of course, or at any rate pretty unsafe, and at an early stage we got a jeep for my personal use about the property. With his Army associations Dad could get to know what was coming up for sale, and he managed to produce a nearly new jeep for me that would give no trouble.
It was a pity that it had to be a jeep, although we neither of us realised that at the time. A man in my condition depends so much upon his car; it means far more to him than a car would to any normal person. This jeep was identical in every respect with the many jeeps that I had driven in the war; it made the same noise, was painted the same colour, had the same soiled canvas seats; the gear lever came to hand in the same place, the steering was the same. It made too strong a link with the war days to be quite healthy; continually it brought back memories that had better have faded with the different scene and with the passage of the years. When I had had a drink or two I would be driving in the darkness round the perimeter track towards our Typhoons at dispersal with Samuelson and Driver and Jack Carter in the jeep with me, Jack Carter who was to collide with Driver over the target an hour later and fall together with him in a flaming mass, and Samuelson who was to pull out far too low over the train so that the flak got him and he crashed on the line ahead of the ruined engine, belching smoke and steam and cinders high into the air. There was the little clip above the instrument panel that I never learned the use of, in which Jack Carter left his pipe before
we went to the machines, in which I found his pipe when we came back. Once or twice at Coombargana when I was a bit tired I reached out to take that pipe out of the clip, and it wasn't there.
Helen was living at home when I got back, though she was making plans to go to England in the spring and straining at the leash to get away. She was six years younger than I was and might have been good company for me if things had been different, but mentally we lived in different worlds. I think the war made bigger chasms between Australian young men and women than in England, where girls were called up and had to serve in the Armed Forces like the men. In Australia war service for girls was on an easier basis, and Helen and her friends had had no difficulty in avoiding it and in pursuing their lives more or less uninterrupted through the war; indeed the pretext of doing war work in Melbourne had made it easier for them to leave the country and take a flat in town. For these girls the war had little reality; no bomb fell within two thousand miles of them, no death came near them, no military discipline forced them into contact with girls of another class; they came out of the war in much the same state of mind as they went into it, avid to get to London and to Paris, to the seats of fashion and of culture that the silly nuisance of the war had stopped them visiting before.
Most Australian men returning from the war accepted their girls for what they were, reflecting perhaps that men are different from women and girls are like that. I couldn't do it. Perhaps my disability had made me bitter and critical, but I had spent six years in daily contact with Englishwomen in the RAF who had shared many of my own experiences, had been scared stiff when I was scared myself, had known the same discipline, had grieved for friends when I had grieved, had turned to cigarettes and grog to hide the grief as I had turned myself These Englishwomen spoke the same language that I spoke and thought in the same way; compared with them Helen and her friends seemed shallow and trivial to me, people of no account incessantly preoccupied with details of their clothes and personal adornment, and their unending, foolish parties.
On her part, Helen found me much changed by the war, and changed for the worse. I had gone to it a pleasant, affable, and intelligent young man, a good dancer and skier, popular with her friends. I had come back from it an unpleasant, soured cripple, contemptuous of her friends and their way of life, a man with a sharp, bitter tongue, and a fairly heavy drinker. I think my return put the lid on it for Helen; like most young Australians she wanted to get out into a wider world, and by the time I had been home a month it would have taken a dog collar and a chain to keep her at Coombargana.
She sailed for England in December 1946; we had a reconciliation when she went for I had behaved badly to her, and we parted on better terms than we had been since I came home. After she went I saw no more of her friends and it was lonely at Coombargana; I did not care for them but, in the words of Barrie, they were like a flight of birds, and when they went it seemed that they had taken away the sun in then-pockets. I met very few young women after that. I was conscientiously trying to learn the business of the property but I couldn't make it a full-time occupation. I had been brought up at Coombargana in the wool business and, in fact, there wasn't a lot left for me to learn; running a station isn't as difficult as all that. My father was still active and able to make quick decisions, not yet ready to turn over management to me. We have an interest in a cattle station in the Northern Territory, a property of about fifteen hundred square miles about three hundred miles north of Alice Springs near Tennant Creek, and I used to go up there for him once or twice a year for a few days. I wasn't much good up there because I wasn't really safe upon a horse and I couldn't walk very far; in the bush I had to have one of the stockmen with me all the time, because if I had fallen from my horse I couldn't have caught him again and I could never have walked out back to the homestead. However, I was able to look through the books and talk to everyone, and this saved my father a good deal of travelling.